1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a structured document processing and converting system for converting a structured document generated by an SGML (Standard Generated Markup Language), an XML (eXtensible Markup Language), an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), etc. into a structured document having another structure.
2. Description of the Related Art
With drastic progress of the Internet, there are an increasing number of events in which data on the Internet is described in a structured document because once the structured document is described in the structured document, it can be easily changed and extended later. For example, in the Web contents on the Internet, there are some sites such as the site of the press etc. that continue publishing the latest data and information. To constantly and continuously publish the latest Web contents, it is necessary to easily update the Web contents.
The Web contents are mainly configured by data and styles. The data and the styles are rarely updated simultaneously, and normally updated separately. For example, FIG. 1 shows an example of updating only data, that is, only the data indicating the contents of the items of the abstract and the date is updated. FIG. 2 shows an example of updating only the style, and the font for use on the display is changed without changing the contents of the display of each item.
The definition of the data and the style is performed using a structured document. FIG. 3 shows an example of a structured document. The structured document is configured by a plurality of elements, and each element is formed by an item name (tag) and element content (data).
At present, in the structured documents, an XML is used in defining data, and an HTML is especially used in defining a style.
The present application is to process and analyze the tag and data in the structured document, and pass a part of them to the user application. The user application aims at offering various services by performing data processing on the basis of a received document.
Since data and a style are stored together in the HTML, it is hard to separately manage the data and the style in the HTML. Therefore, to flexibly represent data in the XML and separately define a style is proposed by prior art.
(1) Prior Art 1: HTML Conversion Using an XSLT
FIG. 4 shows the outline of the prior art 1.
In the system according to the prior art 1, a style sheet (XSL) extensible style sheet language) 43 for conversion of an XML document 41 is generated.
In FIG. 4, the XML document 41 is converted into an HTML document 44 by a conversion engine (XSLT: XML Stylesheet Language Transformations) 42 on the basis of the style sheet 43 described in the XSL.
In this system, once a style is defined, the document can be automatically converted into the HTML document although the data in the XML document 41 is changed.
(2) Prior Art 2 (Japanese Patent Application No. 2004-042289)
FIG. 5 shows the outline of the prior art 2. The prior art 2 has been proposed by applicant of the present invention to solve the problems of the systems such as the patent document 1 etc. in which the data structure of a structured document is managed by dividing the structure of the document into subtrees, the attribute of each element and the element content are managed as position information, a document is extracted according to the position information, and the extracted data is assigned directly to a document converting template, thereby reducing the load of a CPU.
In the system of the prior art 2, a document converting template 54 is extracted from a prepared HTML design. Only a tag defined by a one-to-one correspondence definition 53 is extracted from an XML document 51, and the extracted data is specified and embedded in the document converting template 54.
In this system, since the HTML design can be used as is, it is not necessary to perform XSLT programming.
FIG. 6 shows the demerit of the system of the prior art 1.
In the system according to the prior art 1, an HTML design 62 is generated by an HTML editor 61, and an XSLT tag is embedded in the HTML design 62, thereby programming 63 s XSL style sheet 64 on the basis of the XML. As a result, when the HTML editor 61 cannot be directly used in changing the design. Therefore, since a display style cannot be directly watched on the HTML editor 61 although a changing process is to be performed while checking the display style, it takes some time to perform the process. Furthermore, since the style cannot be changed while the process is confirmed by the HTML editor, it is very difficult to update the style. In addition, the XSL style sheet 64 has to be manually generated, there arises the problem of reusability when a design change is to be made.
FIG. 7 shows the disadvantage of the system of the prior art 2.
In the system of the prior art 2, when there is a repetitive portion of listing etc. in the HTML design, the portion is to be extracted as is as a template from the HTML design or reprocessed, the reusability of the HTML design is very poor.
With the above-mentioned problems taken into account, the present invention aims at providing a document conversion and use system capable of using the design generated on the HTML editor.
The present invention also aims at providing a document conversion and use system capable of visually editing a template displayed on the HTML editor.
The present invention further aims at providing a document conversion and use system capable of automatically converting a document, while it is being edited, by specifying an element content without generating the XSLT as in the conventional system or extracting data from the HTML design.
Also the present invention aims at providing a document conversion and use system having high reusability although a document includes a repetitive structure such as a table, a list, etc.    Patent Document 1: Japanese Published Patent Application No. 2003-67403